Why it works: Spinach and bread work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓
Another Common English Receipt for Spinach
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Remove spinach leaves from the stalks, checking for and discarding any weeds.
Wash the spinach thoroughly to remove all grit.
Place the spinach in a large saucepan with the water that clings to it.
Cook and serve
Add the salt and press the spinach down with a wooden spoon, turning it often for about 15 minutes until tender.
Drain excess moisture and chop the spinach quickly on a hot plate.
Serve immediately with snippets of bread.
Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.
Explore the science
The flavor team
The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.
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Spinach + breadtop 15% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together466 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Fresh spinach leaves
- Forms the entire dish, wilting down to a tender, concentrated green mass as it cooks.
- Coarse sea salt
- Seasons the spinach and helps draw out moisture as the leaves soften.
The step that matters
Drain excess moisture before chopping. Spinach holds a lot of water, and leftover liquid would dilute its flavour and make the chopped spinach soggy rather than tender and concentrated.
“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.
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